France was now to give him something different. He was to be educated, or rather to receive what passed for an education. He remained at a seminary at Orleans till the age of seventeen, hating his studies, becoming more and more intractable and unteachable. This seminary, as all such institutions in France at the time, was conducted by Jesuit priests. In later days he declared that all he had learned from the years that he had spent at the seminary were a hatred of hypocrisy, false virtue and spying. And with malicious irony he said: "And I also learnt there a little of that spirit of Jesuit casuistry, which is a force not to be despised in the struggle with other people." His sole ambition was to escape, to get to sea again, to make voyages to the tropics. His mother dreamed of placing him as a cadet in the navy, but he ignominiously failed to pass the necessary examination. He was therefore placed in the merchant marine. This decision of his mother he regretted bitterly to the end of his life. In 1865 he embarked aboard the _Luzitano_, a cargo boat, on a voyage from Havre to Rio de Janeiro. His grade aboard this ship was that of a pilot's apprentice. Of this voyage, which enabled him to see again the tropics, Gauguin retained in later years important memories. In the fragmentary note-books he kept in Tahiti he declared that it was during this voyage that he heard from the lips of a ship-mate a story of the latter's life when ship-wrecked among the natives of the Society Islands in the Pacific. The remembrance of that story may have influenced him later in his choice of Tahiti as an ideal residence. At least the appearance of Rio de Janeiro's harbor awakened in his mind fresh enthusiasm for the tropics. The stay at Rio was further signalized by a liaison with an actress, of that eminently casual kind which Gauguin was to experience so often later on. Finally the return voyage brought about another liaison, this time with a Prussian woman, and in defiance of ship's discipline. It was certain that his character--was not of the sort that could be fitted easily into the mold of self-restraint necessary to produce a capable naval officer. At all events, the next thing we hear is that Gauguin quitted the merchant service and enlisted in the French Navy as a common sailor, in February, 1868. Probably by this time his mother had refused to support him, and he was forced into this position through necessity. The cruiser _Jerome Napoleon_, on which he found himself, was, to his chagrin, ordered to cruise in northern waters. So instead of seeing the tropics again, Gauguin's new experiences were only of the ice-bound Greenland coast and the barren North Cape. This was bad, but still worse was to follow. The vessel was on its way to Spitzbergen when news was brought to its captain that France had declared war upon Prussia. "Where are you going?" said the second officer, seeing the Captain put the helm about.